Blizzard

The fifth official Hearthstone Ranked Play Season is now live—and we’re unveiling a new card back you can add to your collection!

Beat the heat of summer and ascend the Ranked Play ladder to earn the refreshingly frosty* Icecrown card back! You can only earn this card back by playing Hearthstone during the month of August.

These card backs replace the art decorating the reverse side of your cards and are a great way to show off your Hearthstone accomplishments. Add the Icecrown card back to your collection by hitting Rank 20 in Ranked Play mode. You’ll receive the Icecrown card back at the end of August’s Ranked Play Season.

Don’t forget—the further you move up the Ranked Play ladder, the more bonus stars you’ll receive next season. In Ranked Play, you’ll receive bonus stars based on your performance from the previous season —one bonus star per rank you attained. Please note that even if bonus stars from the previous season get you directly to Rank 20 or above, you still have to log in at least once each Ranked Season to qualify for the card back reward.

If the frozen wastes of Northrend won’t cool your drive for heated competition, hone your heroic efforts in on the biggest prize of them all—the $250,000 prize pool at the Hearthstone World Championship! The top 16 players from Ranked Play Season 5 will qualify to participate in a Hearthstone Championship Qualifier Tournament. Click here for more info on the Hearthstone World Championship.

This is the last month to qualify for the Championship Qualifier Tournament through Ranked Play, so don’t miss out on this cool opportunity!

The best way to beat the heat is to keep a cool head as you rise through the ranks! Battle your way up the Ranked Play ladder with our fifth official Ranked Play Season, The Chill of Icecrown, running through the month of August!

*Warning: Brain freeze, shivers, and chattering teeth may accompany the use of the Icecrown card back. The cold never bothered me anyway.

Hearthstone Deck Tech

Each week HSSpacewizard will be building, testing, and breaking down decks to help players get an edge--this week he's looking at the Plague Quarter.

Blue Tweets

Our Blue Tweet Tracker highlights all the tweets that contain useful information which may not make it to the official forums. Check out some of the recent ones below:

Purchasing Issues with the Plague Quarter

There are some issues tied to players accessing the new wings, and the Technical Support team has been diligently updating the forums with news. Here's the latest:

Glaxigrav

UPDATE: 7/31/14 3:30pm PDT

Our development team continues to work on the known issues for Hearthstone. These are the latest updates:

Players who have completed double purchases – We are currently investigating incidents where players were erroneously charged more than once to unlock the new Plague Wing, or were unable to purchase the wing using gold. While this issue no longer seems to be occurring for new purchasers, if your account was previously charged more than once for any purchases, we currently investigating and working to provide reimbursements as appropriate.

Waiting for Authorization – We are actively working on a resolution for this issue. We don’t currently have an ETA available, but we’ll provide further updates as soon as they are available.

Purchases complete but wing not unlocked – We are identifying all of the affected accounts and will be working to unlock the Plague Wing for those affected as soon as possible. No ETA is currently available regarding when this process will be complete.

Thank you for your continued patience! Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues, and we will continue to provide updates as soon as they are available.

Thanks to everyone for your continued patience. We're working as hard as we can to identify and isolate each issue, and resolve this situation as quickly as possible.

At this time, Blizzard Customer Support doesn't have the ability to provide refunds for purchases that may have gone awry due to these ongoing issues. Not to worry! The Hearthstone Dev Team is well aware of the impact this has had, and they are working to deliver the purchased content and address billing concerns.

As we hear any updates throughout the day, we'll be sure to post them here. We can't stress enough how important it is to help us keep this thread organized, and everyone has done a fantastic job of that and providing us with the information that we need to investigate and get this fixed. Much appreciated!

Good morning, everyone. We're continuing the monitor the payment issues that are happening when trying to purchase the Plague Quarter. Rest assured our technicians are on the case.

In addition to the issues mentioned below, we wanted to let you know of other issues that we're also aware of. We don't have an ETA on these issues just yet, but our development team continues to investigate and are working towards a resolution.

In Game Shop closed intermittently

Double-billed for Naxxramas purchases

Being stuck or crashing while "Waiting for Authorization"

Naxxramas Wings are unavailable after successfully purchasing

Thank you for your patience, folks.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For failed purchases made by gold, the gold will be released back to you within 10 minutes or so.

For failed purchases made by cash on PC, the money will be released from your bank within 72 hours (per your financial institution's policies)

For failed purchases made by iTunes on iPad, the money will be reimbursed according to apple's policies.

For all cases where more than one purchase was successful (gold, cash, or iTunes), our development team continues to review and work towards a resolution for these.

We are able to see which accounts have multiple purchases that were successfully completed with the Plague Wing unlocked, so even if you haven't posted in this thread the resolution will be rolled out to you as well as soon as it's ready!

We are investigating cases where players are attempting to purchase the Curse of Naxxramas: Plague Quarter wing. Our technicians are on the case! To help aid their investigation, we'd like to collect some additional information:

Cash or Gold purchase: Error received (if any):

To help keep data collection clean for our development team's research, off-topic posts may be deleted. Thank you!

Some players may also encounter Shop Closed messages when attempting to purchase access to Naxxramas wings, which we are also investigating.